Page 117 of The Mars House

“Try and eat all of it.”

“Thanks.”

The exploded egg was surprisingly good, and even the rice tasted wonderful. Before long, he realized half of what he’d thought was just misery had been hunger, for all he had thought he’d been eating enough. After a little while, he risked a glance up.

“It’s bizarre not to be filmed. We could say anything. I could say I hate rice and nobody will be offended.”

“I could talk about Ancient Greek verbs,” Gale said. They paused, and looked hunted. “I mean—I won’t.”

“Oh my God, tell me about verbs, quickly!”

Both of them were too excited; it woke up Yuan, who sat up and peered at the stew until January fed him some. Then he stretched tinily and trundled round to sit with Gale. Gale stroked his hair to make him look up and gave him some keys to play with. January wouldn’t have thought keys would be very interesting, but Yuan looked fascinated, both legs out in front of him and the keys fanned out carefully on the groundsheet, where they winked in the light of the heat filaments.

“Have we ever been unobserved?” Gale asked. “Since the first day I came to your apartment?”

January tried to think. “No.” He hesitated. “Hi.” He bowed a little. “I’m January.”

Gale did too, slowly. They looked scared, but not that he would do anything violent. Scared of—him, his opinion. “River.”

“River,” January repeated, and it felt right.

They were both quiet for a while. The little camping stove shushed. Outside somewhere, a long, long way off, there was a primal moan: mammoths talking to each other through the storm.

January wanted to take Gale’s hand, but he didn’t dare to touch them. He had his bearings back now, after an hour out of the cage, but that didn’t mean anything. Under his heat suit, his shirt was going unpleasantly stiff, and it kept sticking to him. He was trying hard not to think about why. Under the part of him that was functioning quite well, given that it hadn’t slept and had been shot, he could feel a smoking void, and the smoke was getting denser, and more dangerous. Soon it was going to start choking off the rest of him.

He blinked twice and realized he felt the way he had before the altitude medicine kicked in; panicky, cold, full of broken glass.

“It’s blood loss,” Gale said. “Just rest for a little while.”

He did as he was told, hugging his bag again. Gale put a blanket over him. It was soft; sealskin, the expensive lab-grown kind that had always been better than any new polymers. His shoulder was pulsing a nasty, nauseous pain up through his whole chest now. He must have looked ill, because Gale pressed one hand to his forehead. If he had a fever, though, they didn’t say anything about it, and only touched the side of his skull to make him stay down when he tried to lift his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For needing to be looked after.”

“I’m the one who should be apologising. You were shot in my house.”

“I’m very provoking.”

Gale hummed, which might have been the start of a laugh or not. They were quiet for a while then. He found himself tracing the patterns in the heating filaments of the ground sheet, seeing—probably there was a significant psychological reason for it—rabbits. Yuan curled up in Gale’s lap, still holding the keys. He hadn’t asked where his mum was. Maybe he knew; or maybe he was used to being handed around any spare adults.

January hoped more people would find their way out of Songshu and to the warehouse. Most Earthstrongers wouldn’t be affected by the internet outage.

“Are you okay with him?” he asked, because if kids weren’t really your thing, there was nothing more unpleasant than being saddled with an unexpected one.

“Them,” Gale said, sharp and incredulous, like January had smacked a stack of pornography in front of them, but it sounded like autopilot. They frowned. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“No, it . . . you’re right. It is weird to say that about a child.” Actually it was horrifying, now he was thinking on it. “Are you, though?”

Gale nodded, still looking anxious that he was offended.

“Stop looking at me like I might shoot someone,” he murmured. He had to put his hand over his eyes, because the light seemed too bright now. “It’s just Tharsis. You can all bake amazingly, you’re all obsessed with upsettingly dreadful folk music, and you don’t do gender. Those things are on a level. No, I’m . . . lying, I care about the baking thing.” He could feel his mind vapouring off in strange directions, but he couldn’t catch at any of it, never mind scoop it back in. “I don’t like the weird red bean paste everyone claims is jam, though. It’s not jam.”

Gale laughed low down in their ribcage and looked down for a little while at Yuan, who was asleep now, breathing in the snuffly way babies did. “I’m sorry about before, as well,” they said. “I told Solly to change the script, the show psychologist told them too, but they wouldn’t have it.”

“What?”